There are thousands golf course In the US. You can find them in every state and almost every county. There’s probably one near you.
If you take all these data points, you’ll see that per 100,000 voters, there are more golf courses in red areas than in blue areas.
There are thousands of them brewery It is also found in the United States, but it is much more concentrated on coasts and urban areas.
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The brewer-to-voter ratio is much higher in some of the bluest districts in the country, where Joe Biden won votes in 2020.
Just whether they enjoy a drink at a brewery or a round of golf doesn’t tell you how people will vote. But the geographic distribution of these two places shows how different our environments are, often along political lines.
It’s not just golf and beer brewing. When people who live in America’s reddest neighborhoods step out of their homes, they see a different landscape of stores, restaurants, and venues than those who live in politically more egalitarian neighborhoods or the bluest neighborhoods.
We wanted to look at the relationship between politics and the places around us. So, using data from the Overture Maps Foundation, we took the locations of millions of different stores, restaurants, churches, parks, and more and lined them up with 2020 election results, down to the precincts.
I don’t understand who Go to each location. But we know how each region’s neighborhoods vote.
Sometimes the results are obvious. Yoga studios and cocktail bars skew toward deep blue zones, while gun stores and farms skew toward redder zones. But they show how our politics, geography, and lives intersect, but not always in obvious ways.
The reason these graphs often look this way is primarily due to urban-rural disparities. Certain activities like golf require space, and rural areas of the country tend to vote Republican. Meanwhile, small, Democratic-leaning urban centers with breweries, coffee shops and bookstores could become the commercial hubs of red counties. Those businesses appear blue in the dataset, even if they are equally frequented by Republicans and Democrats.
“Business location is probably primarily motivated by income level and population density,” said Nick Rogers, a sociology professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “It just so happens that local political ideology is highly correlated with these things.”
Of course, there are places that are everywhere.
And depending on your location, you may not easily fit into one bucket or the other.
Consider a Baptist church. The majority of these churches, of which there are tens of thousands in the United States, are located in the South. That means they are concentrated in both Republican areas and predominantly Black and Democratic areas. The resulting distribution looks like this:
Double humps can also be seen in wineries. California alone shows a concentration of wine production along both its blue coastline and red Central Valley.
For many brands, partisan maps originate from the regional base of the business. Piggly Wiggly primarily serves the redder states of the South, while Food Lion has spread to more politically diverse regions of the Southeast.
But maps traverse people and places in many different ways. Liberal voters in Los Angeles may have never heard of Piggly Wiggly. But that person may have never heard of Stop & Shop, a supermarket located in the blue Northeast.
Other brands that were less geographically focused expanded by pursuing customers they already knew. For example, Whole Foods, Peet’s Coffee, and luxury sportswear brand Lululemon have high-income customer bases in urban areas.
Overture data in this analysis reflects companies and locations that record location information on Meta or Microsoft platforms. Data is incomplete and includes mislabeled locations and closed stores. However, it is the best publicly available dataset of its kind, allowing us to see patterns in the data that are not captured by consumer preference surveys.
Here we will introduce an overview of them.
fast food
One fast food chain found in many azure neighborhoods is Popeyes. This chicken joint can be found in many southern cities, as well as all over the West Coast and up and down Interstate 95.
Competitor Chick-fil-A has also moved into many blue spaces, despite controversy over gay rights in the early 2010s.
Among the chains found in redder locations are Tennessee-based Hardee’s and Oklahoma-based Sonic.
And Burger King is as ubiquitous as McDonald’s.
coffee shop
Starbucks is by far the largest coffee chain in the United States, and while it may feel like it’s everywhere, it’s heading toward a slightly more crowded space.
Some smaller coffee chains have a bigger bias. West Coast chains like Blue Bottle and Peet’s Coffee are common in some of the bluest regions. The largest chain in our data with a strong presence in redder regions is Scooter’s Coffee.
breakfast spot
The IHOP area is bluer than the area surrounding Bob Evans, a primarily Midwestern restaurant. Huddle House is the major breakfast chain most frequented in the red area of the data.
convenience store
7-Eleven started in Texas, but has since spread to many blue regions.
Local convenience store chains in red areas include Casey’s General Store and Allsup’s.
religious facility
The headquarters of the Mormon Church is located in blue Salt Lake City. However, there are many temples in the Mountain West countryside.
First Congregational Church, on the other hand, is the common name for a church in the United Church of Christ, a socially liberal Protestant denomination common in New England.
First United Methodist Church is located in the red area.
Both Hindu and Buddhist temples are usually located in more liberal areas.
expert
Our data also show significant patterns in occupations, which are likely due primarily to rural-urban political divisions.
Some jobs are better suited to cities.
Others, to the countryside:
Still others can find business almost anywhere.
leisure
Much of what we do in our hobbies is also reflected in politics as a whole.
service
Basic services follow a similar pattern. Fire departments are biased toward red because they need to be located everywhere, regardless of the number of people living there. Even small rural communities need a fire department. Considering population density:
On the other hand, elementary schools are highly dependent on population.
Train stations, including subway stops, tend to be located in urban areas.
And while propane supply companies are everywhere, they typically do more business in rural areas far from natural gas pipelines.
Taken together, these patterns remind us of how large and diverse this country is, in its location and politics.
Below you can explore the distribution of 100 leading coffee chains, grocery stores, shops, and other locations.
See more: Political geography of America’s 100 largest corporations
methodology
Location of interest data is provided by Meta and Microsoft. Overture Map Foundation. Nearly 10 million locations were used in this analysis. Although this is the most comprehensive data set of its kind publicly available, it is by no means perfect.
This data includes, as of October 23, companies and organizations that have recorded their location information on Meta or Microsoft’s platforms, either through their individual social media accounts or when large chains provide all their location data to the platform. Includes location. It may also include locations mentioned by users in posts to meta apps and Microsoft apps.
Data includes incorrect locations, typos, mislabeled locations, and closed stores. Companies that have not yet published their information online may also be excluded. To limit the inclusion of fraudulent data, we used Overture’s confidence measure to filter the data and exclude locations with fewer than 15 votes.
The 2020 district-level election results have been compiled below. harvard dataverse. The vote share was calculated by comparing the number of votes received by Donald Trump and Joe Biden in each district.
